REFLECTIONS ON A CONVERSATION.

Yesterday, my sister-in-law asked me if I was going to her brother’s place for Christmas this year. Granted, I don’t know her brother, and granted I tend to avoid bustling family gatherings in public places, such as hotels (and there’ve been a few of those), I said I wasn’t sure. She asked me if I got lonely, and I said that since I’d been diagnosed as autistic, I had met my people. She said that she wasn’t asking about my tribe but my biological family.

My biological family is complicated. My mother was an only child, and my father the eldest of five. My grandparents didn’t want my father to leave home and get married and my grandfather told my father, the next day, that he’d walked out on them. And my paternal grandparents weren’t enamored with my mother.

Some of the complaints my paternal grandparents had with my mother can be traced to simple differences. For example, my paternal grandfather stood up to offer my mother his chair, and she declined. She said that she had been brought up not to take a chair from an older person; my paternal grandfather, on the other hand, considered it polite to offer a female his chair.

I am the second of my paternal grandparents’ sixteen grandchildren and the eldest of my maternal grandparents’ two. So, my cousin was their eldest, I was the first to take the Wynn surname and when I was eight months old, their first granddaughter was born. My grandmother, one day, had my first female cousin out there, and she waited until my aunty and uncle had left (my aunty married a man whose parents were a post-war success story. Italian immigrants who worked as cane-cutters in Far North Queensland, who earnt a lot of money, and they bought their son the land on which his house was built. My uncle started his working life as a fitter and turner with Holden, and when the company closed its factory, in Brisbane, his father bought him a slasher and tractor to set up a business and funded him to establish a fence building business) and took my cousin to her doctor, believing her to be underweight and the doctor was concerned. That caused a rift between my grandmother and my aunty and caused my mother to hold my father’s family at arm’s length.

Even though my parents are my biological parents, I have, to a degree, felt like a baby who was the result of a one-night stand between an Australian soldier or American GI and a Vietnamese sex worker, airlifted to Australia, after the ceasefire was broken and adopted by my parents and my brother was their natural son. Why? Well, physically, growing up, my mother noted that I was the only one who had fairer hair, and I am the only autistic member of my family. I suspect my grandmother was autistic and had some personality issues, and I have some autistic and neurodiverse cousins and I suspect my father’s brother has ADHD. I have sort of felt as though someone would have looked at a kid who was the result of a one-night stand between an Australian or American GI and a Vietnamese sex worker and thought, “Okay, that kid is obviously part-Asian. Is that his father, because I don’t think that’s his mother.” That is, I am the only person in my immediate family who is autistic.

So, I feel like I missed out on a lot. My school holidays were spent having to entertain a brother who always wanted someone to play with, from straight after breakfast until he went to bed at night, and no request for a break from me was ever accepted.

My sister-in-law believes that I should push out of my comfort zone. Well, have I got a lesson for her. I had an infusion on Thursday, then, I had to get up Friday morning to bring my father home from the mechanic after he dropped his car off, then, my brother was working and his mother-in-law was in Adelaide for work, so I was asked to look after my niece and nephew while my disabled mother was given a shower. My nephew, at age three, isn’t someone who will just sit beside me and watch TV, or sit beside me and let me read him a story. He wanted me to draw him a picture, and while I was trying to, he decided he wanted to do some watering in the backyard and I was trying not to get him to hose me. Then, he wanted to do something else, and something else, and I was fortunate to stop myself from having a meltdown when he wanted five things and my mother barked five things at me and I was able to calmly say, “Please, stop! This is too much.” My mother didn’t think it was, and I said, “If Professor Tony Attwood was here, he would ask you to stop.” My mother said nothing.

Then, in the afternoon, I had to take my father to collect his car from the mechanic, and all I could do was go into my room and spend a bit of time on my computer, as I felt overloaded. Needless to say, my nephew got wet from hosing.

The thought of having to spend five or six hours on Christmas Day with people I don’t know is off putting. Okay, in 2019, they came over and I was asleep (it was my first Christmas without Nutsy and it hurt, so I didn’t want to be around anyone). I might be amenable to driving my parents over to my sister-in-law’s brother’s house and spending half an hour there, then leaving, and then, I’ll drive out to get my parents, arriving half an hour before they want to go home, and spend a bit of time there, and then take them home. That way, I could be seen as making some effort but not tiring myself out.

And, I am the only member of my family who needs a gluten-free diet and I don’t expect accommodations there.

My sister-in-law, despite her attempt at allyship, still sees things through a neurotypical prism. She doesn’t understand that I have to get out of my comfort zone to live in a world that is not designed for me every single day. And the last thing I want for Christmas is a case of burnout.